DigitalRoute Announces Launch of DRLabs and Receives Financing From VINNOVA

STOCKHOLM, November 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

New hub to bring innovation off the drawing board and build a culture of creativity within leading data company

Digital Route AB, a leading provider of mediation and data integration solutions for the communications industry, has announced both that it has won a major funding award from VINNOVA, the Swedish government innovation agency, and the creation of DRLabs. DRLabs will proactively harness the company's creative engine and market knowledge by formalizing the process through which new ideas are turned into innovations that can impact markets.

DRLabs will provide an exciting environment in which DigitalRoute's key resources, its people, can put their ideas to work. A step before formal product development, prototypes can be built and road-tested and preliminary research undertaken. As such, DRLabs will act an in-house incubator for nascent ideas. For the DigitalRoute community of employees, partners and customers this is an exciting advancement. It will foster a spirit of co-operation and innovation across those working with MediationZone®, the DigitalRoute platform, and help ensure that innovation is customer validated from the outset.

A number of initiatives are already in progress within DRLabs. Notable among them is DaggerEngine, DigitalRoute's mediation integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) project. This aims to provide automated decisioning solutions that will become available to customers who previously would not have been able to access advanced MediationZone technology through more traditional delivery mechanisms.

Funding for DRLabs comes in part from a recently announced grant awarded by VINNOVA - the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems. VINNOVA's mission is to strengthen Sweden's innovativeness, aiding sustainable growth and benefiting society. 58 different projects in several areas recently won awards the purpose of which was to encourage small and medium sized Swedish companies to increase their competitiveness by investing in research and development. DigitalRoute received 3.5m SEK, the largest IT industry award given.

Commented Jan Karlsson, Chief Executive Officer, DigitalRoute: "DigitalRoute was founded twelve years ago based on a creative vision that the area of telecoms billing mediation could be re-invented by the application of new technologies. Today MediationZone, which now has over 260 customers around the globe, attests to what can be achieved if creativity is given the opportunity to be disruptive."

Karlsson continued, "DRLabs is building on and extending this DNA of innovation that sits at the core of DigitalRoute. For our community, the prospect of what might be achieved, as evidenced by the first wave of projects now being undertaken, is truly exciting."